Palin: Going out like the Sex Pistols

The Sex Pistols famously played only a single song at their last concert: a cover of the Stooges' "No Fun." Sarah Palin just did the political equivalent.

Five days later, no one really knows why Sarah Palin gave her "You won't have Sarah Palin to kick around any more" speech. No major scandal has raised its head, and the FBI has denied that there is any investigation into Sarah Palin's activities. I suppose it's still possible that there is a state-level probe, or that a private individual is blackmailing her, but these are remote possibilities.

No, I think Palin looked at the prospects for the last 18 months of her governorship, and saw that it wasn't going to be any fun. She was plagued by ethics scandals, real and trumped-up. She was a favorite punching bag of the "mainstream media," with extremely negative articles recently in both Vanity Fair and Politico. She even picked a fight with David Letterman. And she had completely disengaged from the Alaska legislature. Not even the Republicans are working with her. She'll face a constant drumbeat of governmental stalemate, ethics investigations, and mockery from the national press.

Hat tip to the excellent Neuroworld, which did some great armchair psychoanalysis the day she resigned.

She strikes me a bit like a child of mediocre intelligence who’s been told she’s a genius... As one study found, telling a child that he or she is “clever,” before asking him or her to perform a task, “caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards... And so, having been told that she’s a genius politician and the cure to all of America’s ills and the should-be next President of the United States of America, Palin finds she’s unable even to function as governor of a relatively small state. She gets frustrated, angry, distressed. She goes so far as to actually quit the task at hand.

There was probably some kind of proximate cause that pushed her over the brink. It'll be interesting to find out what it was that caused her to call that rushed press conference.

What's next for Palin? I don't think she even knows. I very much doubt this was a carefully planned strategy to position her for 2012 or anything else. I think she'll eventually find a way to milk her fame for a pretty good payday (c.f. Public Image Limited). She'll have a lot more fun and make a lot more money as a sort of Ann Coulter/Sean Hannity media figure rather than an elected official. She'll tease the media about running in 2012 to keep a high profile, but her chances are so bad she probably won't risk what's left of her reputation. All of which means we will have Sarah Palin to kick around for a very long time.